The Time Traveller first steps out of his magnificent time transport machine in the year 802,700! He finds the Earth populated by a race of slender pacifists and decides to study this lush land of flower people before returning to his own age. These pacifists, he discovers, have built their wealth on the backs of a slave class forced to live below ground. As the conflict between them surfaces, the Time Traveller finds that his only means of escape, his time machine, has been stolen.

Wells' amazing view of the future propelled forward from his own Victorian-era present serves both as classic science fiction and as a parable of the chasm between the working class suffering and upper class privilege of his day.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), born in Bromley, Kent, England, was apprenticed to a drygoodsman and a druggist before he made his way to the Royal College of Science where he studied biology. The first great writer of science fiction, he was also a prophet, journalist, and spokesman for progress. Aerial warfare and the atomic bomb, which he “invented” in The War in the Air (1908) and The World Set Free (1914), have proved as apocalyptically destructive as he prophesied.